Sphero team hacks together an Android controlled blender

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Having won the AT&T developer hackathon just before CES this year, the Sphero developer team decided that their booth was the perfect place to create an Android-controlled blender. To accomplish this, the team took one of their Sphero robots and rigged it up to the blender in less than 20 minutes.

The Orbotix team has a history of having a good time. These robotics professionals view taking things apart and messing with them as downtime, which is one of the reasons their Sphero product is so developer friendly. As the team celebrates 20 apps that interact with the Sphero directly at CES this year, they felt it was necessary to demonstrate that the hardware used in their little robots can do just about anything. To accomplish this the team invited me to come to their booth and help hack a Sphero onto a blender. Well, I say help, but really I just held tools for Sphero founder Adam Wilson while he did all the work.

Since Sphero robots are sealed within their plastic casing, the team used an early unit that had a clear and removable casing. The important parts for this hack lie within the board that controls the Sphero, which you can see in greater detail in our look inside the ball last year.

There are several places on the robot that generate enough power to activate the switch that will be soldered on to the blender. The basic idea here is that when a command is given to the Sphere from the Android phone, the robot would trip the switch, which would in turn activate the blender. Once the best place was located, a pair of wires were soldered in place. These wires were, in turn, connected to a switch that would be used to turn the blender on once power was received. Once the Sphero had been augmented, it was time for the blender.

For the most part, blenders are fairly simple creatures. In order to get what they wanted from the machine, the plastic casing had to be removed. Wires were soldered on to the switch that turns the blender on and off. Once these wires were connected to the hacked Sphero, all that was needed was instructions from the phone controlling the Sphero.

Of the many apps available for Sphero, Macro Lab gives the user much more control over their robot. Using Macro Lab, we were able to set an infinite loop script that forced the robot to trigger the switch that was soldered to it any time the play button on the script was pressed. Once the phone was Bluetooth-paired to the Sphero, and the blender plugged in, the team had successfully created an Android-controlled blender.

It’s unlikely that most people will attempt this hack using the same techniques, since most who order the $130 robot would rather play with it intact.

Sphero has had a great year, going from a small company that had a cool product that most people weren’t quite sure what to do with, to a platform full of apps and games. Despite the growth, the company is clearly still all about having fun while working.